No stars (turkey). Rated PG-13, for relentless sci-fi action violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.23.17
This isn’t even a good video
game.
As a movie, it’s a $260 million
disaster.
 |
| When Col. William Lennox (Josh Duhamel) inexplicably decides that the über-evil Megatron might help U.S. forces find some all-important Transformers tech, he okays the release of a ferocious quartet of evil Decepticons. Which immediately start fragging every human being in sight. Like, anybody expected otherwise? |
Actually, the term movie doesn’t even apply. Movies have
plots. And characters. This cacophonous monument of soulless wretched excess
has neither.
I’m frankly astonished that Art
Marcum, Matt Holloway, Ken Nolan and Akiva Goldsman have the audacity to claim
credit for a script. The spoken lines in this junkyard dog are so sparse —
often limited to monosyllabic exhortations such as “We’ve got to go!,” “Hang
on!,” “Good job!” and “Jump!” — and the action so haphazard, that one could
watch the entire 149-minute mess with the dialog track eliminated entirely, and
have just as much success trying to extract meaning from the bonkers narrative.
That also would spare us from the
faux profundities in the film’s hilariously overwrought voice-over narration.
The Monty Python gang, at their prime, could not have concocted more
ludicrously silly monologues. But helmer Michael Bay intends us to take them
seriously.
Bay began his career as a
director of music videos, and it could be argued — particularly during the past
decade — that he never shifted gears. Such video shorts are no more than a
series of flamboyant, hyper-edited visuals solely in service of the music; with
very rare exception, there’s no such thing as “story” or “character.”
The same could be said of Transformers: The L(e)ast Knight, fifth
entry in this increasingly dismal franchise, which is no more than an overlong
showcase reel for numerous special effects companies. Bay couldn’t care less
about story, and he obviously couldn’t care less about character; his notion of
an “emotional moment” starts and stops with a tight-tight-tight close-up of a given actor’s face, always bearing a silent,
stricken, gape-mouthed expression. Pause and hold for what seems an eternity.
Tears are optional (but desired).
The result would be laughable, if
the process of watching the damn thing weren’t so relentlessly repetitious,
predictable, exhausting and tediously dull.
Bay doesn’t make movies; he makes
product. Noisy,
lowest-common-denominator trash designed for an indiscriminate international
market.
Expensive and impressively
mounted trash, to be fair ... but trash nonetheless.
